Corruption and Crime

The home of Orley Antunes, owner and director of Morretes Notícia, a local daily published in the southern state of Paraná, was targeted in a bomb attack on the night of January 17, Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo (ABRAJI) has reported. According to Antunes, the front door was opened and the bomb was launched towards the stairs that lead to the second floor. Antunes, who is 60...

Drug traffickers fired shots at a TV Globo helicopter in Rio de Janeiro on January 24, according to Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS). The TV crew was covering a police operation taking place in the favelas (shantytowns) in the Sao Carlos region of Rio de Janeiro, when it came under attack. During the operation, one drug trafficker was killed and three others were injured. The attack forced the...

Nilo Jiménez, secretary for Reporteros Gráficos of the Venezuelan National Press Workers Union (abbreviated to SNTP in Spanish), has reported that he received death threats via several anonymous calls. In these calls, he was urged to stop gathering images of attacks against press freedom for an upcoming union publication, on the occasion of the institution's 65th anniversary. According to the...

A local radio presenter with a reputation for outspokenness was shot in the head and killed January 24 on the island of Palawan in the west of the Philippines. Gerardo Ortega hosted a daily programme "Ramatak", on the station Radio Mindanao Network (RMN) dwAR. A man, identified as Marvin Alcaraz and said to be resident in Manila, is reported to have been arrested at the scene of the crime carrying...

The Mexican government should regard two grenade attacks this week on news media in northern Mexico – one against Televisa in Piedras Negras and one against a local newspaper in Monterrey – as a serious warning and should speed implementation of a federal-level convention on the protection of journalists that was signed in November, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF)...

The president of the government-run National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), Raúl Plascencia, said killings, disappearances, and kidnappings of media workers and activists will be a priority for the agency in 2011, Milenio reports, according to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. In order to face the growing number of crimes against journalists, Plascencia said the CNDH will...

The police in Croatia have detained the alleged perpetrators of the brutal attack on Jutarnji List journalist Dusan Miljus, according to the South and East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO). On December 22, in the scope of operational actions under the name of "Shock 3", the Croatian police detained four suspects allegedly connected to the Miljus case. Two years ago, on June 2, 2008, in front of...

Alfrets Mirulewan, the editor of Pelangi Weekly, a newspaper published in the eastern Indonesian province of Maluku, has been killed. His body was found on a beach on December 17, three days after he disappeared while investigating illegal gasoline trading in the Maluku archipelago, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Many of his colleagues believe he was...

The death of Sun Hongjie, a senior reporter at the Northern Xinjiang Morning Post, must be fully investigated by regional authorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and by central authorities in Beijing, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Sun died in a hospital in Kuitun today, 10 days after being beaten by several men at a construction site, international news...

Makhmadyusuf Ismoilov, a newspaper reporter who has been detained arbitrarily by prosecutors in Khujand, in the northern Tajikistan province of Sughd, is being held since November 23, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Ismoilov was arrested at the behest of the regional prosecutor’s office one day after an article he wrote about its alleged corrupt and...